Another framework. Another “must-watch” talk. Another video saved for later. Keeping up with technology can start to feel like a watch list you will never finish.

yt-digest summarizes a YouTube video for you, on your Mac, with the Claude or ChatGPT plan you already pay for, and files the summary in Heptabase or Notion. Read it in a minute, then decide whether the full video is worth your time.

From YouTube to Heptabase or Notion

Open a video's ⋮ menu on YouTube, on a card or under the player, and choose Summarize. You do not have to open the video. A few seconds to a few minutes later, a macOS notification says the digest is ready: a card in Heptabase, tagged yt-digest, or a page in Notion, with the video embedded at the top and three sections:

• Conclusion: what the video says, in two to four sentences.
• Main arguments: about one per three minutes of video, in the speaker's own terms, each linked to its moment.
• References: what the video cites, such as articles, repositories and books, each as a link.

The toolbar button picks where the digest is saved (Heptabase, or Notion, in your Private section or inside a folder page), the digest's language (English by default, or 繁體中文, 简体中文, 日本語, 한국어, Español) and the model: Claude's, through Claude Code, or OpenAI's, through Codex CLI. The details are in docs/spec.md.

How it runs

• Local: the extension, a Native Messaging host and a launchd worker, all on your Mac. There is no server.
• Your own plan: the worker runs claude -p or codex exec, signed in with your subscription. No API key.
• Isolated: a transcript is someone else's text and may try to instruct the model, so the model runs with nothing it can act with: no web, no shell, none of your settings, an empty folder, and nothing it writes is run.
• Private: what you watch stays on your Mac, until a digest goes to Heptabase or Notion. The extension keeps only your choices: where to save, the language and the model.
• Once per video: a video already summarized is skipped, and a failed one can be requested again.

This is a personal tool, not a service.

Installing

On a Mac with Apple Silicon, with Homebrew, Chrome, and the Heptabase app or a Notion account:

git clone https://github.com/cjumeow/watch-less.git yt-digest
cd yt-digest
sh scripts/setup.sh

The script installs what yt-digest needs and is missing, after asking you once, then installs yt-digest itself:

• Node.js 24, yt-dlp (reads a video's subtitles), and ffmpeg and mlx_whisper (transcribe a video without subtitles), with Homebrew and uv;
• Claude Code or Codex CLI, whichever you choose, and signs you in with your Claude or ChatGPT plan, not an API key;
• yt-digest, in ~/Library/Application Support/yt-digest/app/, where Chrome can reach it and it runs in the background whenever you request a summary.

A few steps are yours, and the script tells you when:

1. Heptabase's CLI: in the Heptabase app's settings, install the CLI and turn on the Local CLI Server.
2. Notion, optional: to save digests to Notion, install its CLI with curl -fsSL https://ntn.dev | bash and sign in with ntn login; the script offers the sign-in once ntn is installed. Then choose Notion in the popup.
3. The extension, once: in chrome://extensions, turn on Developer mode, press Load unpacked and pick ~/Library/Application Support/yt-digest/app/extension/dist (press ⌘⇧G in the picker to type the path).

To update, git pull, run npm run install-local, and press Reload on yt-digest in chrome://extensions.

Development

How the repository is organized, its conventions and the skills agents use are in AGENTS.md.

npm install
npm run check   # everything CI runs